Five Ways to Use Twitter's New Targeting Capabilities

via http://www.adweek.com

With the announcement of its new ad targeting capability, “tailored audiences,” Twitter opens the door to more data and sends a message to the rest of the marketing world that the new programmatic era has arrived.

Tailored audiences, a partnership between Twitter and companies like Chango, allows more advanced targeting at the individual level, meaning it takes into account the kinds of things people do when they’re not on Twitter, from visiting websites to searching for products on Google.

Until now, Promoted Tweets were limited to what Twitter already knew about a user—gender, location, interests. Meanwhile, access to big data and programmatic marketing tools were confined to the worlds of display ads and the increasingly popular Facebook media exchange, FBX. Starting this week, these capabilities combine into a powerful tool that has far-reaching implications for CMOs and others in the marketing business.

Here are five ways to use these capabilities in your next campaign, from “Twitter’s Tailored Audiences Handbook”:

1. Acquire new customers: Send a Promoted Tweet to in-market consumers who haven’t previously engaged with your brand but have searched for relevant terms. For example, a manufacturer of car seats for children could deliver a special offer via Twitter to customers who type the words “baby car seat” into a search engine. Using a partner like Chango that can collect billions of searches from Google, Yahoo and Bing can make it possible to do this.

2. Encourage new customers to engage socially: Leveraging information about a user who has visited a brand’s website, more commonly thought of as “retargeting,” can now be reimagined on Twitter with the tailored audiences product. A good use of this program is to deliver a promotional message on Twitter to a user who hasn’t made a purchase yet.

3. Start a conversation with brand loyalists: With Twitter’s tailored audiences, marketers will be able to run a Promoted Tweets campaign to their most frequent visitors, as well as to individuals who have visited sites that are positively associated with their own brand.

4. Market to a subset of your existing customers: Many marketers already keep track of their audiences in CRM systems, some of which have incorporated engagements on Twitter. This CRM data can now be made actionable on Twitter. For example, an advertiser could run a Promoted Account campaign to its most active customers from the previous month. 

5. Reconnect with dormant customers: Rather than showing dozens of banner ads to a an inactive user, a marketer can now look at each consumer at the individual level and decide what type of outreach represents the maximum value, or when the right moment is to make contact based on a person’s historical purchases.